How-To track visitors to your website

This document will explain how you can track users to your website using Google Analytics. By placing a small snippet of code at the bottom of every page on your website, you’ll be able to see how many people are visiting your site, how many clicks are performed on your site, and where they are coming from. Some of the more advanced features allow you to track how many people follow a certain “flow,” enabling you to optimize a certain process.

Before you begin, you’ll need a Google account and a website. If you don’t have a Google account, create one (You can even use an existing email address as your new Google Account).

This completes the account creation section. Now I will explain how to insert the tracking code onto your website. Conveniently, once you create the account, Google Analytics will take you to a page showing the tracking code and simple instructions:

2. Install the tracking code on your website
This is actually the tricky part. The idea is to place the tracking code right before the</body>
tag of each page you want to track. This is going to be different for each website depending on the type of website you have.

Here are some instructions on installing Google Analytics on some of the popular types of sites:

WordPress

Blogger

… (more to come – comment if you’d like one in particular)

If your site is different from the ones listed above, you can still insert the tracking code. If you would like me to post a how-to, leave a comment and I’ll add to the list. Otherwise…

Copy the tracking code from Google Analytics:

Open each page of your website and paste the code right before the </body> tag, like this:

Your site might be set up to have a universal footer, which would make your life much easier. This universal footer is included on every page to save time for the web developer. It is typically called ‘footer.php,’ ‘footer.html,’ ‘footer.cfm’ (you get the idea). If your site has a universal footer, you can insert the code just before the </body> tag. If there is no </body> tag, just paste it at the bottom of the universal footer.

Once your tracking code is installed, let it gather some data for a few days and log into Google Analytics for the reports.